Eli Gold will return to Alabama radio booth in 2023

When Alabama fans turn on the radio broadcast this season, they’ll hear a voice they haven’t heard in far too long. Eli Gold will be back behind the microphone.

Gold confirmed his plans on Tide 100.9 on Friday. He missed the 2022 campaign due to health issues that turned out to be Stage 3 cancer, he announced in January. At the time, he said it was treatable, and he rang the bell this past April to signify the end of his treatment.

It’s been a long year for Gold, between a long hospital stay — 186 days, to be exact — and losing nearly 140 pounds. Now, he’ll be back where he belongs: in the radio booth.

“I’m now healthy, ready to go and looking forward to the season,” Gold said, via the Tuscaloosa News’ Nick Kelly.

Gold has been the voice of the Crimson Tide since 1988 and also hosted NASCAR Live on the Motor Racing Network from 1982 to 2016 on top of his duties at Alabama.

Gold announced his diagnosis in January when he confirmed he was dealing with a “treatable form of cancer” and shared his desire to get back to the booth. Chris Stewart filled in for him during the 2022 campaign and made sure to start every edition of “Hey Coach and The Nick Saban Show” by acknowledging the seat wasn’t his. It was Gold’s.

Stewart also paid tribute to the beloved play-by-play announcer after the first Alabama touchdown of the season, saying “We miss you Eli” before shouting his signature “Touchdown, Alabama!”

The reason for Gold’s absence wasn’t clear until his announcement in January. As it turns out, a case of the hiccups ended up leading doctors to the diagnosis, as he told WSNP.

“And finally, finally — you can laugh, it’s not funny but it’s humorous to some degree — I ended up with a terrible case of the hiccups. I was hiccupping and hiccupping to such a degree that I couldn’t — this was in December, middle to late December — I was hiccupping to such a degree, I couldn’t even catch my breath,” Gold said. “I mean, I was struggling to breath because I couldn’t get any breath because I was hiccupping. Well, the doctor who they brought in to figure this deal out with the hiccups is the one who stumbled upon what that was doing and why it was happening. And because of that, I was having — I had cancer. The hiccups in a roundabout way were caused by the cancer and they learned from that.”